Portugal: Evora and Faro

Next up on our rapid fire tour of Europe was the little Portugese town of Evora. Almost devoid of accomodation options and needing to move pretty fast we checked into the local Ibis franchise, damn europe is expensive. Evora is a little walled town with narrow alleys and some supposed charms, but really Lisbon managed a lot more charm despite its huge comparative population, go figure.

After getting pretty heavily rained and retreating to our hotel the first night, we did a quick exploration of the old town which seemed quintessentissentially quaint with its wee cobbled (read deadly slippery) alleyways, odd little eateries, one internet cafe and houses built into the arches of the 16th century aqueduct. The two star attractions were the ruined roman temple, and the church with a chapel lined with human bones. Neither of which filled me with a greater sense of my own smallness, but then I never took classics at school.

In fact the big surprise of Evora in fact was just how insanely difficult it was to travel from Portugal to Spain by bus. In order to travel directly eastwards across the now mythical border would have reauired two buses and a taxi ride. So instead we zipped south to Faro found a great, cheap hotel right by the bus station and shipped out again early in the morning for Seville. Faro seemed like a nice small seaside town, but by the time we got there the only place open for dinner was McDonalds (why yes I will have beer with my quarter pounder) and we were left with a nocturnal inspection of the town square and it's vividly painted ceramic goats.

Portugal: Lisbon

We had gotten to Rio airport with plenty of time to spare, expecting the worst with our dodgy e-tickets but for the first time and in a country where we didn't speak the language they worked fine and after flying through the underworked security checkpoint we were left with three hours to kill. And guess what, Rio airport has three overpriced shops and a broken internet cafe left over from the 90's. :(

The flight itself was pretty full, and the inflight entetainment kept working long enough for me to watch Quantum of Solace (average), and Slumdog Millionaire (quite good), and I even managed to snatch a few hours sleep which was useful as we were arriving in Lisbon in the morning and needed to get a full day of sight seeing in as we were meeting up with our old friend Ruth from Auckland, and her new british friend Nicola.

After a really rough start fighting with stupid Portugese ATM's we managed to catch the local bus in from the airport and found the hostel we had booked almost straight despite an apparent desperate shortage of materials for street signs in Lisbon. The hostel was about the nicest we've stayed in during this trip, bright and clean and oddly layed out. Our dorm beds wouldn't be ready till the afternoon but to make it up to us we got breakfast which went along way to humanizing us after the long trip.

Our good luck held and we found Ruth's fancy hotel pretty close by and we headed off for the Torre de Belem. Lisbon is a really interesting compact city to visit, so much so that we didn't find out that the tower was closed for Easter until late afternoon. On the way we explored the botanic gardens, stopped for morning tea, viewed the city from a lovely Mirador (I hereby pronounce this spanish word captured and introduced into english), found the slow but fun electric train along the waterfront, stopped for more pastries, viewed the front of an immense monastery, and skimmed through a very large and very free modern art museum. Needless to say we weren't terribly upset and continued on to accend the Monument to the Discoveries. We had a good view of the harbour and especially Lisbon's copies of other peoples monuments. Amusingly the harbour bridge is a dead ringer for the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and sited behind that on a concrete pedestal is Christ the King, a fairly good likeness for the Christ the Redeemer we had just visited in Rio.

Day One in europe ended with a little lie down in our dorm and a good dose of chinese food. We had stumbled on an authentic and not too expensive restaurant while searching for authentic portugese food and immediately succumbed. Jacquie got to practice her Chinese and I got to drink brandy made from (tree) flowers, Awesome!

Day two continued in much the same vein except that the owner of our hostel had shown up and jabbed at us with cinnamon pancakes during breakfast, pronouncing "Eat!". We did, and it was very good. Then after retreiving our high living friends we trapsed over to the Castle of Saint George. Stopping for a couple of Cathedrals, and another Mirador. The larger cathedral was awesome and gothic and even had some real layered Roman/Moorish ruins in the cloister. Europe seems to be drowning in this history stuff, you daren't break ground lest you find some history lurking around. Jacquie is always surprised by the piles of authentic roman Amphorae lying around outside museums that they just don't know what to do with.

The castle itself blurs a bit already but I don't think it was particularly big just a square figure eight with two large courtyards and some towers to climb. If there was anything particularly distinctive about it I've completely fogotten about it after visiting the Alhambra (yes that is a teaser).

We went for a drink or two with Ruth that night and it was great to continue the catch up, it's amazing how great it is to spend time with folks that you A) know and B) share a common cultural context with.

The third day Ruth and Nicola went shopping and we made a bee-line for the Torre de Belem and got to hide inside while Lisbon got thoroughly rained on. The Tower is built right in the water and was built to guard the harbour from incoming ships with ill intent. It was nice enough but suffered from some traffic issues as half a horder of tourists tried to get up and down a perilous narrow spiral staircase. We also got to visit the Oceanarium. I was completely hooked on going once I discovered they had a sunfish which did make some pretty awesome viewing.

Transport outward was on the dubious portugese coach system, but I'll have to try and catch up on that later.

First Day in Morocco

I'm working on the epic europe post honestly but I thought I'd get something out about our first day in Morocco.

We caught the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar along with several hundred moroccans, and added another oddity to our list of random ways to immigrate. Everyone on the boat got to file past a remarkably bored looking moroccan official who added another stamp to our growing collection. Our guide book had steeled us for a scrum of touts and taxi drivers when we got off but it turned out to be a quiet sunday afternoon instead. We took a short walk along the water front and then proceeded to get almost entirely lost in the unconfusing 'new' part of the city with the help of the brand new and entirely innacurate Lonely Planet maps. Wandering up and down stairway streets and narrow alleys between three or four storey buildings I eventually spotted our hotel and we proceeded to prove to the landlady that we speak neither arabic or french. However the hotel itself is for a change quite pleasant although a little odd. Our room has a big comfy bed, sea views, and a 2 foot square shower with the nearest toilet across the hall. Apparently some bloke called William S Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch there too, but it no longer appears to be frequented by the perpetually toasted.

We ventured out for dinner and only had to go two blocks before we found a fantastic little converted apartment restaurant with bead curtains, a 70's hippy soundtrack and our first tajines. The streets had gotten busy by the time we got out, and it was reinforced to us just how young morocco is, just about everyone was under 21, and the streets were genuinely bussling.

We slept well, waking only briefly to the first call to prayer at what Jacquie tells me was about 4 in the morning. We headed to the old walled part of the city (the bit that is supposed to be hard to navigate) and had a poke round. We visited the American legation museum and saw a letter written by George Washington as well as a hilarious letter from a previous diplomat on his failure to reject the gift of two prime moroccan lions. There was another museum too, with proof of Tangiers founding way back to pre-roman times. We didn't quite get properly lost but we did get accosted by that obnoxious ever so friendly, ever questioning breed of tout so common to some countries. We'd had a very unpleasent run in this morning with a self appointed guide who's negotiation technique had involved far too much insult to my parentage for me to be able pay him anything so we have not been particularly forthcoming since then.

I don't think I can take anymore of this ridiculous french keyboard so I'll leave it at that for tonight, and see whether this keyboard grows on me tomorrow.

The Iguazu Falls form part of the border between Argentina and Brazil. We'd decided to explore from the Argentinian side and after another five star bus trip had found ourselves nice blissfully airconditioned room in Puerto Iguazu. The next day we set out early to beat the heat and headed for the falls. They form a long quarter circle stretching away from a remarkably broad placid and fish filled river and none of the falls are particularly high volume but there's a good 20 metre drop and at least a dozen individual waterfalls making the site pretty spectacular. We walked for a good 4 hours through the various trails above and below the falls, and waded in the shallows of the river when it got too hot.

Wildlife-wise I lost track of the number of lizards we had scuttle away from us on the oaths and we saw a whole mess of vultures, but most worrying was the signs advising you to stay on the path because of snakes, and the snatches of other peoples converstaions about rattle snakes followed up by actual rattling noises as we wandered some of the less crowded paths but I am at least half convinced that it was merely man-eating cicadas.

We crossed the border the next day and with it ended any semblance of competence with the local language. Foz do Iguaçu like all Brazil speaks Portugese which is really not as similar to Spanish as you may think, so we were back to miming, smiling and hoping for people that spoke english. We spent half a day in Foz and managed a visit to a big bird park (I got outvoted on visiting the worlds longest hydroelectric dam). I would like to reiterate that Toucans are entirely awesome and quite intelligent to boot. We were highly entertained by the professional photographer trying to keep them from chewing his equipment while waiting for a bird to sit on his prepared scenic stick. Like a toddler anything that isn't boring old tree gets a good chewing from their ridiculous beak.

Nothing reinforced the you are not in Argentina anymore vibe as much as our return to lame buses. In Expensive over-airconditioned uncomfort we crossed a fair chunk of Brazil to Florianopolis gateway to beautiful Ilha de Santa Catarina. We immediately got on a local bus to head to the beach and try and track down one of the affordable hostels we had labouriously extracted from the internet. But instead we got off the bus at the last stop and were swooped on by a local tout. Normally we ignore these people but this guy had a lot going for him, he spoke tourist grade spanish, and he told us what we would get and how much we would have to pay for it. Its amazing how many touts just can't work out that having a price for something is quite important to making a sale. So three minutes walk along our first beautiful white Brazilian beach we arrived at a beach bar, walked through the middle of it to a courtyard where our luxury, double bed with fan, private bathroom and kitchen apartment awaited us. The beach was literally no more than 10 metres away and if you craned your head right at the wrong end of the bed you could see the waves crashing from inside, and all for NZD40 a night (I love off season).

The next few days were spent going for several swims a day, and wandering around the beach and the local towns. Brazil is quite developed so it was much like going to the beach at home except with good public transport. Although the system they use in Brazil where you board the bus, pay a conductor (not the driver) then mangle youself through a turnstile part way down the now lurching bus leaves something to be desired.

The two great food things about Brazil are the tropical fruits and the 'per kilos'. Brazil has juice bars everywhere where for cheap (<4NZD for 500ml) you can get anyone of 30 something different fruits you've never heard of, murderised, and in a glass for your drinking pleasure. King of these fruits is açai. Which is an amazonian berry you can get in NZ but here it is ubiquitous and affordable and always served in an ice cold smoothy. Yum.

The per kilos are buffet restaurants where you wander up and fill your plate with what you want and then pay for it by the gram. We've been to three different grades of these and they are all well priced for what you get and terribly terribly satisfying. Even better is the ice cream buffet where they let you loose with a scoop on some quite good icecream and sugary condiments and then charge you about NZD2 per 100g. Great for a hot afternoon snack.

Next is Rio de Janeiro, where we actually are now, both determindely catching up on our blogging/letter wrtiting before we catch a plane to Portugal this afternoon. South Rio has some incredible natural beauty, blocks of high rise apartments seperated by jungled clad mountains, and edged with long white beaches. The best things we have done here are just getting up somewhere high and looking around. We ascended the sugar loaf on our first day, which is a particularly steep rock pointing out into the bay from which you can see almost all of Rio spread out before you. Same goes for our visit to Christ the Redeemer set inland further but higher the view was spectacular, but then so was the crowd. The platform was so packed it was hard to move at times. Especially with people posing with the big fulla, copying his pose.

The hostel we are staying at is pretty average but we have had lovely dorm mates, and have been enterained by the family of Marmosets living in the trees of the cul-de-sac, much to the chagrin of the hostel cat.

We've explored Copacabana and Ipanema but it hasn't been particularly sunny while we've been here so they haven't been particularly busy. We did wander around the center of twon the other day which wasn't terribly exciting but we caught a tram up the hill to Santa Teresa which could indeed have been described as exciting if it wasn't at first entirely terrifying. We were just about the last folks on the tram and while jacquie squeezed into the standing room at the back I was left hanging off the side which seemed like a good idea at the time, but as we took off I realized this was not going to be the smoothest of rides, and we took off over the remains of the old Rio agueduct with my shoes occaisionally catching on the concrete skirting going past, and the rusty chickenwire siding, requiring me to push myself inside the car a lot of the way. Just as I felt I had some mastery of the art of avoiding tram-side obstacles we reached the first station and I was able to squeeze inside.

Well thats all of it for now, for the first time since I left I am all caught up on blogging. I will even get ahead and predict that for lunch today I will do my best to consume as much Açai as humanly possible.

Pucon and San Martin on either side of the Chile-Argentina border were really much of a muchness. Tourist towns in the off-season, much like Oakune, except I couldn't find the one cheap kebab shop. The settings were both nice, being in the Lakes District meant both of them were on lakes and they were both well endowed in the tree department. We decided to do the oh so touristy 'Canopy Tour' in Pucon after hearing rave reviews but the five or so zip lines (aka flying foxes) crisscrossing the valley that we were herded over were just a touch harrowing for a certain individual of unorthodox dimensions.

The balance on my harness was all wrong and I spent most of my time trying to stay facing roughly the right direction, an important consideration when you have to rely on your own heavily gloved hand pulling on the cable behind the pulley to brake you (but you can't put too much pressure on that or you end up stuck a bit short like my first zip). After one notable failure of my natural sense of direction ended with my foot colliding with the top of a fairly decent sized tree, I got additional strapping applied but while this kept me deadly straight it also meant my head was about 3 inches from the cable and I was quite surprised to find I hadn't ploughed a groove into my hard hat by the time I finished.

Oddly enough it was our clambering about the place which was much more enjoyable, we tramped around a wee lake and up most of a hill in Pucon, and up around a headland looking out over the terribly scenic lake that San Martin is built on. The south of Chile and Argentina both seem to have huge reserves of well-forested park lands and with the tail end of the Andes running through the middle you can imagine that the result is pretty all right.

After our attempt at heading to the local tourist spots we took a fantastif bus up to Buenos Aires. I've briefly mentioned the buses before but Argentina was another step up. The seats were like the old straight first class seats from the airlines, and for the first time in 3 months of bus travel my knees did not rub against the seat in front ever. The meal was two course and had a really decent hunk of meat in it, and there was even some wine.

The meaty good bus meal was the start of things to come, as we arrived in Buenos Aires world capital of meatanarianism and we started on finally enjoying our first good food since Bolivia. The common tourist option was a mixed grill for two that generally arrived on your table on its own small charcoal barbeque. It had too much offal for Jacq but I developed a bit of a taste for the intestines and blood sausage (if not the kidneys). Luckily we both enjoyed the great big bits of beautifully cooked ribeye and rib steak, and chorizo, and not only did we enjoy it but the supply of meat was pervasive our local mall had not one but three seperate asados in between the very quiet burger king and more appreciated cafes and chinese takeaways. I had had some worries about Aregntina as our two years old guidebook warned of a complete lack of vegetables and epidemic levels of smoking, but in the last couple of years the Argentines have joined the rest of the world and smoking is non-existant in restaurants and they understand that vegetables do exist to enhance your meat eating experience.

Bueones Aires is an interesting city just to walk around, and we did a lot of it. We explored all through the central suburbs, through the rebuilt dock lands where we got to poke around a retired naval training frigate (three big masts and big steam engines) that did about 40 enormous training runs aroudn the world, often complete circumnavigations. The ship is littered with photos of cadets at the parthenon and Japanese samurai gear and the like. We also got to walk on a causeway through the waterfront wetland biosphere reserve beyond the old docks. There we sat on the beach made out of bits of demoished buildings and wondered whether anyone would ever swim in the incredibly silty waters of the Rio de Plata which seperates Argentina from Uruguay.

We also visited a very famous cemetary in the posh part of town where all the famous folks are buried in elaborate mausoleums. Made for a very interesting wander while we planned our own burial edifice, and we even found Evita Perons tomb. We visited the colourful suburb of Boca which is famous for its brightly painted corrugated iron houses, and only a bit ruined by the scary tango ladies who try and grab you so they can charge you fior photographs.

We finally managed to send a box full of our souveneirs (and great toasty alpaca jackets) home, so with light packs we moved on to Puerto Iguazu home of the awesome Iguazu falls.

Santiago, Santiago, Santiago so big and yet so... meh. I think the truth I really have accepted is that my state of mind is directly dependent on the quality of the last few meals consumed and the effort required to obtain them. And Chileans just don't have my best interests in mind in this regard, food is either a expensive and unsatisfying, expensive and all right but hard to find, or it's a completo. A completo is both cheap and easy to find but it is just a hot dog with tomatoes and avocado so while its novel the first time, after walking round town for ages looking for something decent to eat it really stops doing you any good. Here ends the whinge.

Santiago is a big big city, largely built around the same time as physics building at auckland university but with a really attractive metro (aka subway). Seriously while Mexico City had extensive, functional and clean, and Buenos Aires has scary ghetto-chique. Santiago has big art installations and plenty of space to wait the two minutes till the next (not really crowded at all) train.

So where did the metro take us you ask? Well we visited some hills. There are two of them nestled within the clutches of downtown Santiago, one very small, and one very big. The smaller one is accessed via a crazy edwardian entrance way and is cross-crossed with whacky paths, that combined with the dense tropical planting and the sprouty rock formations means your never quite sure where the top is or indeed what is around the next corner. We discovered several elevated plazas, a teeny tiny chapel, tropical gardens complete with baby monkey puzzle trees, and eventually the top from which we could boggle that the great big apartment blocks seemed to continue into the distance in every direction or at least as far as the smog allowed us to see.

We also saw what we thought was either soccer hooliganism or a student protest but turned out to be more of the well dressed begging students we had encountered in La Serena. It turned out (as explained to us by a long term student occupant of our hostel) that at the start of every year here abouts the first year students are ceremonially stripped of their nice new books and fancy bags, there shirts, and shoes, and their cleanliness. And so the first years swarm onto the streets often enhancing their decripidness with flour and mud and beg for coins from the hard working masses and surprisingly often receive them. Then the coins make their way back to the second year students holding the shiny new bags of books, and then there is the purchasing of beer and much fun is had by all.

The second hill was much bigger and more organized, it featured a great big outdoor catholic church and statue of one virgin or another. A cable car (aka funicular) for getting up the hill, and a gondola for traversing it. Swimming pools, restaurants, greenery and all in all far less charm than the completely random paths that we had enjoyed earlier in the day. Although we were amused by our encounter with a reformed Afghanni stow away, who after drifting through various ports in the 70's with no valid passport or visas finally 'legalized' in Sweden and now seemed to be dragging his two boys round South America.

We went to some museums as well, flooded with stolen mexican antiquities and spanish colonial military art and artifacts, oh and some more freeze-dried mummies (much older than the egyptian ones blah blah blah...).

On our last day we just caught the subway 14 stations east and then walked home through the business districts, the central plaza, parks and many shady tree lined boulevards. But then another lng bus trip beckoned and we were off to Pucon.